Drugs Policy and Harm Reduction

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Eugene McCann (Simon Fraser University) and Cristina Temenos (University of Manchester) are working on research projects investigating the mobilities of drug policies through different cities in North America, Europe, Australia, and the Caribbean.

They have a particular focus on harm reduction drug policies. They are interested in the ways that the practices and ideas around harm reduction circulate and get taken up in different cities. More specifically, they study the political debates that accompany around harm reduction drug policies, how the politics of drug policy operates in ways that are simultaneously local, regional, national, and global, and the ways that transnational advocacy networks for drug policy reform operate in relation to local drug policy formation. Their research seeks to uncover how harm reduction ideas, practices, and advocacy strategies affect urbanization, and the ways that spaces of urban public health affect the lives of the people inhabiting those places. See below for publications and presentations on this research.

McCann, E. (2011) Harm reduction as a global social movement. Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SFU Chapter) panel on Harm Reduction on Campus, Vancouver, March 2011. [pdf]

McCann, E. (2011) Situated knowledge on the move? Reflections on urban policy mobilities/immobilities. Urban Geography Study Group of the Institute of Australian Geographers. Wollongong, July 2011. [pdf]

McCann, E. (2008) Down here: Situatedness, empowerment, and drug policy in Vancouver, British Columbia. Keynote address to the European Science Foundation/UNESCO Chair conference on The Right to the City: New Challenges, New Issues. Vadstena, Sweden, October 2008. [pdf]

McCann, E. (2008) Urban/global: A geographical perspective on the role of cities and urban activists in the politics of harm reduction. International Harm Reduction Association 19th International Conference, Barcelona, May 2008. [pdf]

McCann, E. and Campbell, S. (2008) Urban policy and public health crisis: the complex implications of epidemic infection & drug overdose death in Vancouver, Canada, 1994- 2008. International Sociological Association, Research Committee on the Sociology of Urban and Regional Development (RC21) conference, Tokyo, December 2008. [pdf]